Cookeville Sees Growing Interest In Manufacturers Moving In

The desire to manufacture in Cookeville has reached new levels.

Economic Development Coordinator Melinda Keifer said her team has answered more requests from prospective manufacturers in the past 12 weeks than all of 2020 and possibly all of 2019.

“The realization we are all coming to is that manufacturing is becoming more prevalent,” Keifer said. “Whether it’s they are not offshoring or reshoring. It’s probably a little bit of both.”

Keifer said the city is feeling the pressure from the interest since aging infrastructure may be an issue. Keifer said for example, any energy efficiency sector require large amounts of resources.

“This country in general has not built their infrastructure for manufacturing for the past 30 years,” Keifer said. “They just simply haven’t. We’re feeling the push and the pull and the tug on that.”

Keifer said Cookeville leadership has had several conversations about the interest. Keifer described the situation as, “The next chapter of what we want to be.”

“We’re fixing to grow up a few more years in a very quick way,” Keifer said. “So, it’s all positive.”